From The Onion, America's Finest News Source, some seriously edgy satire on the UCSB shootings last Friday. But here is the real point of the piece: America is "a nation where over half of the world’s deadliest mass shootings have occurred in the past 50 years and whose citizens are 20 times more likely to die of gun violence than those of other developed nations."

And this:

At press time, residents of the only economically advanced nation in the world where roughly two mass shootings have occurred every month for the past five years were referring to themselves and their situation as “helpless.”

That's not funny, and yet no one talks very much about that - other than to lament that isolated, unstable, young men with weapons are increasingly likely to shoot a whole lot of people before committing suicide by cop.

Perhaps the reason Americans are 20 times more likely to die of gun violence than in other developed nations is because we have a national fetish for guns that no other developed country possesses. No matter how many of the slaughters take place, the fetishists of the NRA will never allow gun restrictions to become law.

‘No Way To Prevent This,’ Says Only Nation Where This Regularly Happens

ISSUE 50•21 • May 27, 2014

ISLA VISTA, CA—In the days following a violent rampage in southern California in which a lone attacker killed seven individuals, including himself, and seriously injured over a dozen others, citizens living in the only country where this kind of mass killing routinely occurs reportedly concluded Tuesday that there was no way to prevent the massacre from taking place. “This was a terrible tragedy, but sometimes these things just happen and there’s nothing anyone can do to stop them,” said North Carolina resident Samuel Wipper, echoing sentiments expressed by tens of millions of individuals who reside in a nation where over half of the world’s deadliest mass shootings have occurred in the past 50 years and whose citizens are 20 times more likely to die of gun violence than those of other developed nations. “It’s a shame, but what can we do? There really wasn’t anything that was going to keep this guy from snapping and killing a lot of people if that’s what he really wanted.” At press time, residents of the only economically advanced nation in the world where roughly two mass shootings have occurred every month for the past five years were referring to themselves and their situation as “helpless.”

Tom Jacobs - Inside the Mind of a Mass Killer

A new analysis of the writings of mass killers reveals the thread that links them together - "feeling rejected, dismissed, disrespected, and devalued" by a real or imagined "in-group" that they often describe as “jocks and preppies.” There is a huge degree of paranoia and intense desire to get revenge, thus the killings.

“The paranoid individual is obsessed with revenge and justifies the revenge as payback for a perceived injustice,” the researchers write. “(Such people are) thin-skinned or hypersensitive to perceived slights (and they) have closed information-processing systems that preclude corrective information which is inconsistent with their world view from being received.”

The notion that many of these kids were bullied is challenged by this study. According to the authors, these people exaggerated the wrongs done to them, blew them out proportion - at least according to their peers. (Who would have no reason to minimize the bullying, right? It's not like they may feel guilty or anything for their possible actions against the young men.)

Still, worth a couple of minutes to read - the article comes from Pacific Standard.

Inside the Mind of a Mass Killer

A new analysis of the writings of mass shooters finds a common strain of paranoia

July 29, 2013 • By Tom Jacobs

The HOPE Columbine Memorial Library that replaced the library where most of the massacre took place. (PHOTO: BIGMAC/WIKIMEDIA COMMONS)

In trying to understand the actions of a mass murderer, our instinct is to grasp blindly for answers, settling on one that feels right. Setting aside the debate over access to guns, this often comes down to a lay diagnosis that the shooter was probably a psychopath—cold, unfeeling, heartless.

A new analysis of the writings of three mass killers and one would-be mass killer, comes to a very different conclusion. A trio of University of British Columbia psychologists led by Donald Dutton report the gunmen appear to have suffered from an intense form of paranoia.

Far from being cool or detached, these young men were enraged, their delusions of persecution becoming ever more intense and intolerable.

The researchers analyzed the writings of Eric Harris, who (along with friend Dylan Klebold) killed 13 of his fellow students at Columbine High School in 1999; Seung Hui Cho, who killed 32 people at Virginia Tech in 2007; Kimveer Gill, who shot 20 people, killing one, at Dawson College in Montreal in 2006; and Anders Breivik, who killed 82 people at a youth camp in Norway in 2011 (plus another seven in a bomb blast outside the Prime Minister’s office).“They become and remain fixated and obsessed with rejection by what they see as an elite in-group, whom they see as having unfairly achieved success,” Dutton and his colleagues write in a compelling paper just published in the journal Aggression and Violent Behavior. “Instead of transcending the rejection, they formulate plans to annihilate the transgressors, which they justify as vengeance for the transgressions made against them.”

They looked at the perpetrators’ diaries or blog entries in the weeks leading up to the shooting, as well as a manifesto Breivik circulated in a mass email in an attempt to explain himself. Aside from Breivik, whose paranoia found expression in socio-political terms, they expressed a surprisingly similar worldview.

“A central theme that runs through these diaries is one of feeling rejected, dismissed, disrespected and devalued by an in-group invariably depicted as “jocks and preppies,” and of wanting vengeance for this maltreatment,” Dutton and his colleagues write. “The in-group is despised for being superficial and for getting unwanted status.”

There is no shortage of examples of this kind of thinking. This is from Harris’ diary:

Everyone is making fun of me because of how I look, how fucking weak I am, and shit, well I will get you all back, ultimate fucking revenge here. You people could have shown more respect, treated me better, asked for more knowledge or guidance more, treated me more like a senior, and maybe I wouldn’t have been so ready to tear your fucking heads off. … Same thing with all those rich snotty toadies at my school. Fuckers think they are higher than me and everyone else with all their $ just because they were born into it?

Here is an online posting by Gill, translated from the French:

If people were making your life a living hell, wouldn’t you be hurt emotionally? How come no one ever talks about those mother fucking jocks and preps whose fault it is. Oh no. Heaven forbid. We can’t possibly say that. Why does society applaud jocks? I do not understand. They are the worst kind of people on earth. And the preps are no better. They think they’re better than others, but they’re not.

Finally, here’s Virginia Tech shooter Seung Hui Cho, apparently addressing the sort of privileged student he despises:

Your Mercedes wasn’t enough? Your golden necklaces weren’t enough? Your trust fund wasn’t enough? Your vodka and cognac weren’t enough? All your debaucheries weren’t enough?

“The paranoid individual is obsessed with revenge and justifies the revenge as payback for a perceived injustice,” the researchers write. “(Such people are) thin-skinned or hypersensitive to perceived slights (and they) have closed information-processing systems that preclude corrective information which is inconsistent with their world view from being received.”

Breivik, the oldest of this group (he was 32 at the time of the killings; Harris was 18, Cho 23, and Hill 25), perceived a different enemy: Muslims. His paranoia “appeared to have worsened when he was past college age,” the researchers write. “Otherwise, his school peers, rather than a politically derived target, may have been selected.”

“He believed that slaughtering a group of teenagers would make him Grand Master Knight Commander, deputized by a secret society to lead the forces of Christendom in a battle for the future of mankind,” they add. “He had military uniforms made to reflect his future status.”

Overall, this analysis suggests many of the media’s cliches regarding mass killers appear to be wrong. They were bullied? “This group greatly exaggerates the negativity of their treatment, as reported by third-party school peers,” the researchers note, adding that their writings contain few references to specific experiences of being a bullying victim.

Perhaps the problem is too few mental health services? Well, three of the four men examined here had been assessed by psychiatrists, none of whom picked up on the deep nature of their disturbances.

That said, one popular conception about these men is clearly correct.

“There were differing levels of social isolation for Cho, Gill, Breivik and Harris,” the researchers write. “Cho had extreme social anxiety, isolated himself and showed social incompetence. Gill and Harris had some friends, but clearly pictured themselves as marginalized. “All were described as loners.”

NRA - 1,000 Dead Children (in a Single Killing) Is the Threshold for Rethinking Our Positions

This is from last May (2012) in The Onion - more relevant today than it was then, which is probably why they re-posted it. Yes, it's satire, technically, but it's much more true than it should be.

NRA Sets 1,000 Killed In School Shooting As Amount It Would Take For Them To Reconsider Much Of Anything

'Yeah, Something Like 1,000 Dead Kids,' Reports Spokesperson

ISSUE 48•22 • May 25, 2012

NRA officials said the school would have to be "super, super bloody" after the shooting for the organization to question their pro-gun stance.

FAIRFAX, VA—National Rifle Association Executive Vice President and CEO Wayne LaPierre said Monday that somewhere around 1,000 kids would have to die in a school shooting in order for the organization to reconsider their longstanding opposition to gun control.

"Yeah, that's probably the only way we'd reassess much of anything at this point: 1,000 dead kids, shot up pretty good, lying face down in the school auditorium or something like that," LaPierre said, noting that anything less than 1,000 dead kids would not be enough for the NRA to stop urging Congress to pass pro-gun legislation. "I mean, that's just a ballpark number, but I imagine seeing 1,000 or so body bags being wheeled out of a school and a whole town of crying parents would probably make us reflect on our values for at least a little bit."

"So yeah, more or less 1,000 dead kids," LaPierre added. "Something around there. And teachers don't count."

In his 21st year leading the right-wing lobbying group, LaPierre reiterated that "350 or 470 dead kids or some low number like that" would have no impact on the NRA's belief that there should be more firearms on college campuses or that concealed carry laws should be more lax.

In order to reconsider their position on the Brady Bill, this amount of kids multiplied by 200 would have to be shot to death in school.

In addition, LaPierre added that while 800 dead kids in one school shooting would "certainly be a little closer to the number we're talking about here," ultimately that amount would, according to the NRA, constitute more of a society issue than a gun issue.

"For us to come anywhere close to reassessing our beliefs, it's gotta be one of those deals where a ton of kids get their heads blown off in school and there is one of those big, town-wide memorial services where they read off all the names of all the dead kids and you feel like, wow, that has to be somewhere around 1,000 names," said LaPierre, adding that seeing pictures of all the dead kids in front of the "pastor or whoever is doing the eulogies or whatever" might be a sobering enough visual for the NRA to reconsider whether it should be harder, not easier, to acquire firearms. "And I think the shooter would also have to use around 30 different types of guns in the shooting in order for us to rethink what the Founding Fathers intended when they wrote the Second Amendment."

The former member of the American Conservative Union's board of directors further qualified his statement, adding that the NRA's response to 1,000 or so kids being mowed down by a school shooter would more than likely vary based on the age of the students, the school's demographics, and the extenuating circumstances of the situation as a whole.

Though he didn't offer a reason why, LaPierre said 1,000 dead 14-year-olds is "not even close to the same thing" as 1,000 dead 18-year-olds.

"If we're talking about one of those big high schools with 4,000 students then 1,000 dead ones aren't really even a drop in the bucket, you know?" LaPierre said, explaining that if an uzi-carrying 16-year-old only kills 45 percent of a school's total population, the NRA would still be more inclined to blame the shooting on poor parenting, and wouldn't consider soft gun laws to be part of the problem. "Oh, and of course, if it's a giant state university or something like that then I'd imagine we'd need to see numbers closer to 8,000 dead kids before we really even begin to talk about potentially having a conversation about changing our philosophy."

"And for argument's sake, let's say it's a situation where 999 people die and the 1,000th person is just the school shooter blowing his brains out," LaPierre continued. "Do you honestly expect me to take that seriously? To me, that seems more like an isolated incident that shouldn't really impact everyone's rights, you know?"

While some believed that LaPierre's remarks finally indicated a slight loosening of the NRA's pro-gun stance, LaPierre was forced to clarify his comments after his membership criticized him for introducing the idea that a playground full of bullet-riddled dead kids might cause the NRA to reconsider their position on gun control if even for a second.

"At the end of the day, I want to make it very clear that the NRA is in absolutely no rush to change anything," LaPierre later said in a written statement. "One thousand dead kids would have very little impact on us. Now if 50,000 kids died in a school shooting that might be a different story. Something around 50,000 to 80,000 dead kids. You know what, forget that. Maybe something closer to 250,000. Yeah, 250,000 dead kids."

Anonymous Hacks Westboro Baptist Church Over Plans to Picket Connecticut Shooting Funerals

Back in 2011, Anonymous declared war on the Westboro Baptist Church, which is really little more than the Phelps extended family members. After offering a peace agreement, Anonymous gave a live demonstration of their hacking prowess as one of their "followers" was being interviewed on a radio show and claiming their websites were protected by god.

Now the feud is back on. After the Westboro cult announced that they would picket the funerals of the children killed Friday in Connecticut, Anonymous retaliated by posting the contact information for all of the church's members online.

This was the original story in Salon in 2011:

Anonymous shuts down Westboro Baptist Church site — during a live interview

After asking for peace, the renegade hacker group launched its first attack on the infamous Christian group

BY ADAM CLARK ESTES

Less than a week ago, a rumor spread that the vigilante hacker organization Anonymous had declared war on the Westboro Baptist Church. Though quickly dismissed as a hoax, the headline-grabbing possibility spread through the media faster than an offensive Kanye West tweet. Given the clandestine nature of Anonymous — as the name implies, all of the member of the group are, in fact, anonymous — the truth proved elusive. Regardless, the Westboro Baptist Church started a smear campaign against Anonymous and insisted that their message could not be silenced. In the words of WBC: “Bring it.“

Hoping to clear the air, radio talk show host David Pakman invited Shirley Phelps-Roper, spokesperson from the Westboro Baptist Church, and an (anonymous) member of Anonymous onto his show for a live web chat. Pakman moderated the conversation, and the banter started out almost cordial. However despite Anonymous’ continued denial of a war or plans of an attack, Phelps-Roper persistently insulted the group and its representative. After Phelps-Roper tells the Anonymous representative he’s going to Hell, Anonymous says, “I have a surprise for you.”

Anonymous unleashed an attack during the insults and directed the audience towards downloads.westborobaptistchurch.com with a notice from Anonymous:

Watch the full interview here. The attack happens around the 9:00 mark.

At the time of publishing this post, all of the Westboro Baptist Church’s various sites — including godhatesfags.com — were inaccessible.

~ Adam Clark Estes blogs the news for Salon.

Here is Salon's take on the new actions by Anonymous.

Anonymous hit Westboro Baptist Church over Sandy Hook picket plans

Hackers publish private information about church members following news that it would picket the Newtown school 

BY NATASHA LENNARD

A Westboro picket in 2005 (Wikimedia)

The ever-hateful Westboro Baptist Church have not failed to deliver in the wake of the Newtown school massacre. The Church, notorious for picketing the funerals of fallen troops with “God Hates Fags” placards, announced Saturday that they would picket Sandy Hook elementary school, where 20 children and six adults were shot dead Friday. Tweets from the Phelps family suggest they believe the horrors in Connecticut are a punishment from God for gay marriage.

Hacker collective Anonymous were swift to respond, releasing private information of Westboro members including email addresses, phone numbers and home addresses. This video, decrying the church for spreading “seeds of hatred.” The video warns, “We will destroy you. We are coming.”

[h/t BetaBeat]

~ Natasha Lennard is an assistant news editor at Salon, covering non-electoral politics, general news and rabble-rousing. Follow her on Twitter @natashalennard, email: nlennard@salon.com.

In case anybody would like to speak to some of the members of the Westboro Baptist Church in regards to their plans to picket the funerals of those children who died, here is the list - Thanks, Anonymous. Here are a few names with which to begin:

Westboro Baptist Church

3701 SW 12th St 

Topeka, KS 66604 

Phone: 785-273-0325 

Email: wbclist@speakfree.net 

Email: info@phelpschartered.com 

Email: chockenbarger@cox.net 

http://www.godhatesfags.com/ 

Phelps Law Firm 

Phelps Chartered 

1414 SW Topeka Boulevard 

Topeka, KS 66612 

PO Box 1886 

Topeka, KS 66601 

Phone: 785-233-4162 

Fax: 785-233-0766 

Fax: 785-969-9017 

Email: info@phelpschartered.com 

Email: slpr@cox.net 

Email: kjhoffice@speakfree.net 

http://www.phelpschartered.com/

* * *

Fred Waldron Phelps, Sr 

Founder of Westboro Baptist Church 

Pastor of Westboro Baptist Church 

Born 1929 

Husband of Margerie "Margie" M. Simms 

Westboro Baptist Church 

3791 SW 12th Street 

Topeka, KS 66604 

Po Box 1886 

Topeka, KS 66601 

Email: wbclist@speakfree.net 

Email: info@phelpschartered.com 

Phone: 785-272-4135 

Phone: 785-273-0325 

Phone: 785-273-0338 

Fax: 785-273-9228

Margerie "Margie" Marie Simms-Phelps 

Born ~ 1930's 

Wife of Fred Waldron Phelps, Sr 

Westboro Baptist Church 

3701 SW 12th Street 

Topeka, KS 66604 

Email: wbclist@speakfree.net 

Email: info@phelpschartered.com 

Phone: 785-273-0325 

Phone: 785-273-0338 

Fax: 785-273-9228

Fred W. Phelps, Jr 

Lawyer at Phelps Chartered 

Staff Attorney for Kansas Department of Corrections 

Born 1953 

Son of Fred Waldron Phelps, Sr 

Wife of Betty Joan Schurle-Phelps 

3600 SW Holly Lane 

Topeka, KS 66604 

Email: fredjr@godhatesfags.com 

Phone: 785-273-0438 

Home: 785-273-0529 

Work: 785-296-3195

Mara Jones-Phelps 

Born ~ Mid-1970's/Mid-1980's 

Wife of Fred W. Phelps, Jr 

3120 SW Westover Rd 

Topeka, KS 66604 

Phone: 785-235-6999 

David Eagleman's Rational, Scientific Worldview

Earlier today I criticized Mike Huckabee's "we need more god in schools" approach to ending mass murders. Here I want to offer a commentary by neuroscientist David Eagleman (author of Incognito: The Secret Lives of the Brain) on Friday's tragedy in Connecticut, from his blog. David Eagleman directs the Initiative on Neuroscience and Law.

Being a neuroscientist, his worldview leans heavily on material causes - and in the case of mental illness and violent acts, he prefers to understand brain chemistry and hormone interactions as causes and not to assign blame from a moralistic perspective.

His view is nearly 180 degrees fro Huckabee's.

After Sandy Hook: Why mental illness matters

The tragic shootings at Sandy Hook have sparked debate ranging from gun control to bulletproof windows at elementary schools.

I suggest the more important issue is to prioritize our national discussion of mental illness.

There seem to be two problems with the discussion at present. The first is a lack of understanding about the terms and their meanings. To illustrate, here’s the complete text from a two-sentence article from Fox News:

Ryan Lanza, 24, brother of gunman Adam Lanza, 20, tells authorities that his younger brother is autistic, or has Asperger syndrome and a “personality disorder.” Neighbors described the younger man to ABC as “odd” and displaying characteristics associated with obsessive-compulsive disorder.

One might consider it impressive to embed so many problems into such a concise article.

First, the phrasing of the first sentence appears to suggest that autism is something like a sum of Asperger’s and a personality disorder. That’s incorrect. Asperger’s is simply a milder form of autism: both are different degrees on a single autistic disorder spectrum, a broad-ranging developmental disorder characterized by problems in relationships and communication. Importantly, there is no known link between autism and pre-meditated violence.

Let’s turn to the item at the end of the first sentence. A personality disorder is a pervasive and inflexible pattern of behavior that causes distress or limits social progress. Because the term personality disorder is standard clinical nomenclature, there is no reason for a reporter to put that term in quotation marks. Perhaps he was simply quoting Ryan? But we wouldn’t expect a reporter to write that Ryan’s “younger brother” is “autistic”. The quotation marks around personality disorder could suggest to the uninitiated reader that the concept is simply a colloquialism, which could—in the worst case—promote dismissal of the important issues around it.

Finally, let’s consider obsessive-compulsive disorder, in which people suffer anxiety from recurrent thoughts and compulsions toward repetitive behaviors. Is its mention in the article an important clue? Probably not: as with autism, there is no known relationship between obsessive-compulsive disorder and violence.

In sum, the two-sentence report uses four mental health terms, two of which are different degrees of the same disorder, one of which is wrapped in quotation marks, and most of which have no plausible bearing on the Sandy Hook shootings.

Did these problems arise from the brother’s misunderstanding, or the neighbors’, or the reporter’s? Whatever the case, the readership is given poor information (and potentially misinformation) about important mental health issues.

Does a public understanding of mental illness matter? Very much. A deeper understanding can fuel early detection, resources,prevention, rehabilitation, and cures. Adam Lanza is dead, and we may never know what pathologies were lurking in the patterns of his neural circuits. But he’s not the point anymore. It’s the next Adam Lanza, growing up now, lurking in the wings of the future.

I suggest we take this tragedy as a wake-up call about how we want to address mental illness in our society. Research and care programs for those with mental problems are continuously under-funded. And as we head for the fiscal cliff, scientists funded by the National Institutes of Health are bracing themselves for the plunge from an already tight budget.

Eagleman goes on to examine some of the comments on that article, and the three he quotes are actually quite in line with Huckabee's perspective - tough discipline and prayer in schools. Here is his response to this type of thinking:

These viewpoints represent a potentially disastrous misunderstanding about mental health illness. At the time of this writing, it is far from clear what was wrong with Adam Lanza—but his behavior alone is sufficient evidence that something was abnormal about his brain. Millions of 20-year-olds on this planet play video games, have divorced parents, are eccentric, have access to guns, and so on—but Lanza tops the news because his actions are so exceptionally rare. Such abnormal decision-making unmasks abnormalities in brain function. To assume that prayer in schools and tough-love parenting is a meaningful solution to brain abnormalities is to miss the boat entirely. It represents unfamiliarity with the long history of brain science. I’ve written about this issue before in Incognito, so I’ll take an excerpt here:

The study of brains and behaviors finds itself in the middle of a conceptual shift. As recently as a century ago, the prevailing attitude was to get psychiatric patients to “toughen up,” either by deprivation, pleading, or torture. The same attitude applied to many disorders; for example, some hundreds of years ago, epileptics were often abhorred because their seizures were understood as demonic possessions—perhaps in direct retribution for earlier behavior. Not surprisingly, this proved an unsuccessful approach.

Indeed, the past century has witnessed a shift from blame to biology. But why? Continuing the excerpt:

Perhaps the largest driving force is the effectiveness of the pharmaceutical treatments. No amount of beating will chase away depression, but a little pill called fluoxetine often does the trick. Schizophrenic symptoms cannot be overcome by exorcism, but can be controlled by risperidone. Mania responds not to talking or to ostracism, but to lithium.

I’m not a great fan of the purely pharmaceutical approach, but its successes underscore the idea that mental problems can be approached in the same clear-eyed manner with which we might approach diabetes, cancer, or an inflammation. More from Incognito:

The more we discover about the circuitry of the brain, the more the answers tip away from accusations of indulgence, lack of motivation, and poor discipline—and move toward the details of the biology. The shift from blame to science reflects our modern understanding that our perceptions and behaviors are controlled by inaccessible subroutines that can be easily perturbed.

In this light, consider this series of provocative questions from my neuroscience colleague Robert Sapolsky:

Is a loved one, sunk in a depression so severe that she cannot function, a case of a disease whose biochemical basis is as “real” as is the biochemistry of, say, diabetes, or is she merely indulging herself? Is a child doing poorly at school because he is unmotivated and slow, or because there is a neurobiologically based learning disability? Is a friend, edging towards a serious problem with substance abuse, displaying a simple lack of discipline, or suffering from problems with the neurochemistry of reward?

To the newsreaders who feel that mental illness is best viewed as an excuse, let me suggest instead that we might more effectually recognize it as a national priority for social policy. If we care to prevent the next mass shooting, we should concentrate our efforts on getting meaningful diagnoses and resources to the next Adam Lanza. There is no advantage in imagining that all brains are the same on the inside, because they’re not. There is no point in concluding that your own child did not perpetrate a school shooting solely because of your terrific parenting. This is not meant to diminish the importance of excellence in parenting—but mental illness is real, and online tips about parental discipline and school prayer will remain insufficient solutions.

Mike Huckabee's Ignorant Mythic Authoritarian Worldview

Now that Mike Huckabee is no longer a political animal, having to measure his words to appear sane and not offend potential voters or donors, he has come unhinged in his mythic authoritarian worldview. This is nowhere more apparent than in his comments about the tragic mass killing in Connecticut. CNN's Belief Blog posted his comments without much in the way of analysis, nor was there any analysis of the longer version posted on their Political Ticker blog.

Generally, I try to ignore people like him, but he has a national platform (Fox News) and there are significant numbers of people who share his (world)view to a greater or lesser extent.

Here is the story:

Huckabee: Lack of religion inclassroom leads to violence in schools

Posted by CNN Political Unit

(CNN) - Responding to the deadly mass shooting Friday in Newtown, Connecticut, former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee said new laws regulating guns won't deter such shootings, linking a lack of religious discussion in the classroom to increased violence in schools.

"We ask why there's violence in our school but we've systematically removed God from our schools," Huckabee said on Fox News. "Should we be so surprised that schools have become such a place of carnage? Because we've made it a place where we don't want to talk about eternity, life, what responsibility means, accountability."

"That we're not just gonna have to be accountable to the police if they catch us but one day we stand before a holy God in judgment. If we don't believe that, then we don't fear that," he said.

"People are going to want to pass new laws," Huckabee continued. "This is a heart issue ... laws don't change this kind of thing."

Huckabee made similar comments following the mass shooting at a movie theater in Aurora, Colorado, earlier this year saying violent acts should not be a surprise considering the removal of religion from public forums.

"We don't have a crime problem, or a gun problem, or even a violence problem. What we have is a sin problem," he said after the July shooting on Fox News. "And since we've ordered God out of our schools and communities; the military and public conversations... we really shouldn't act so surprised when all hell breaks loose."

Friday morning a gunman entered Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut, and opened fire killing 20 students and six adults before apparently killing himself. The tragedy has intensified the debate over gun laws in the U.S.

This tragedy is less about "violence in our schools," although in another sense it is (but not how Huckabee is framing it), and more about how we fail those disturbed young people in our families, our schools, and our communities. This was not Columbine, it was not bullied, disaffected students taking guns into the school and killing fellow students - this was a 20-year-old man who had not been in that school for many, many years.

We may never know what caused this young man to kill his mother and then drive her car to the school and kill 26 young students and faculty, and then himself. [For another perspective, check out the thoughts of neuroscientist David Eagleman.]

I do know that teaching children to fear judgment by an imaginary god is not going to deter mentally ill people from doing things we cannot fathom. [This is not to imply that all mentally ill people are prone to violence, however, people who commit acts such as this are mentally ill.]

We need to do a better job of identifying children who are at risk - those who are outsiders, who have few or no friends, who struggle with social roles, or who exhibit suicidal or homicidal ideation. We need to get them into counseling, into support groups, and, yes, even into spiritual communities and churches.

Children do not grow up to be mass murderers unless something has gone horribly, tragically wrong in their lives. This is where we need to focus our attention.

Bowling for Columbine (Revisited)

After yesterday's horrific killings in Connecticut, Open Culture re-posted the Michael Moore documentary, Bowling for Columbine, which is freely available on YouTube. In the years since that event, mass killings have become more common and even more troubling for the simple reason that we seem to learn nothing from these events. The gun lobby has succeeded in not only preventing more regulation of gun sales, but in many states, like Arizona, gun laws become more and more relaxed - to the point that we are a state that does not require ANY training or permits to carry a concealed weapon.

Bowling for Columbine Revisited

December 14th, 2012

In April 1999, Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold murdered 12 students and one teacher in Columbine, Colorado, while injuring 21 others. Michael Moore documented the tragedy in his 2002 film, Bowling for Columbine, which sits on YouTube, available for everyone to see. It’s heartbreaking to think that a decade later, students are no safer at their schools. If anything, gun control has slackened during the intervening years (thanks partly to the Supreme Court) and mass murders have become more commonplace, if not a monthly occurrence. 12 were killed and 52 injured in Aurora, CO in July. 10 killed in a Sikh temple shooting in Wisconsin this August. Five gunned down at Accent Signage Systems in Minnesota in October. Two shot dead at a mall in Portland, Oregon earlier this week. And now 20 youngsters and seven adults killed at an elementary school today in Connecticut. We’ve reached the point where it has become an exceptional American pathology and too much to bear. (If you’re counting, we’ve had 27 mass murders since Columbine, and exponentially more gun-related deaths than any other country in the developed world.) I sincerely hope this isn’t another instance where we breathlessly express outrage for a week, then turn back to the Kardashians, until the next shooting happens in February at best. Public spaces should be safe, schools all the more so. (Let’s not forget Virginia Tech, which left us with another 32 students dead.) It’s time to take some action. And it’s time for our leaders to stop worrying about lobbies and finally lead.

David Berreby - Psychologists Assume It's Possible to Know A Person: What If They're Wrong?

This is an important and interesting post by David Berreby at Big Think's Mind Matters blog. In the aftermath of James Holmes apparent killing of 12 people (with 58 others wounded) - for absolutely no identifiable reason (so far), "our modern priesthood of experts" is recruited by every news show to "explain" why he possibly could have done this horrible thing.

And they look to their correlations of variables, their indicators and theories, and find precisely nothing. Where are the indicators we want to see, the ones we can associate with senseless slaughter? Where are the traits whose presence would reassure us that it is possible to know who is vulnerable to the lure of mass murder?

There are none. No indications of mental illness earlier in life. No signs of a violent or troubled childhood. No signs of drug abuse. Instead, traces of a mild blank person, whose signature trait seemed to be that he left little impression at all on other people. A background guy, the sort who doesn't make us alert for trouble. His story threatens formal psychology and folk psychology, because it tells us that another person can't be known, not for certain. (That he was himself a grad student in neuroscience, aiming to elucidate how the brain causes behavior, adds a quality of mockery to the tale.)

 It's not a long column, but it's worth the read.

Psychologists Assume It's Possible to Know A Person. What If They're Wrong?

David Berreby on July 23, 2012 [updated on 7/24/2012]